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Toby Harnden
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Toby Harnden

Things Toby Says on Podcasts

Toby Harnden’s next book, The 39: Uncovering the CIA's Secret Heroes, about the undisclosed recipients of the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the Agency's equivalent of the Medal of Honor, will be published by Simon & Schuster on March 23, 2027.

Where to Find Them

Toby Harnden writes SpyTalk . They have also been a guest on SpyTalk and Mission Implausible . They also write for Toby Harnden on Substack.

Recently: “t Was Never About Oil: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Conspiracy Theories That Followed (Toby Harnden)” on Mission Implausible (October 2026); “How ‘Neutral’ Sweden Secretly Prepared to Fight the Russians” on SpyTalk (September 2026); “The Final Word on Carlos the Jackal” on SpyTalk (August 2026); “Implications for the Kabul Catastrophe” on SpyTalk (August 2021).

What They Said

“We kind of won it in two or three months and then spent 20 years losing it.” — Toby Harnden, Mission Implausible

Harnden is discussing the warlords the US relied on in Afghanistan after 9/11, whom the State Department couldn't stand. In his telling, the quick early victory by a handful of CIA officers and Special Forces gave way to two decades of losing ground.

Mission Implausible · 2026-10-12 Permalink → Listen →
Mission Implausible Around 27:01 into the episode
Speaker 5

And I remember J.R. Seager telling me this, that Afghanistan's not really a country. It's a patchwork of ethnicities. You have all these warlords who the State Department absolutely couldn't stand.

Speaker 4

But how do you wield power?

Speaker 5

And survive in Afghanistan if you're not a warlord, which involves kind of corruption, brutality, all sorts of stuff that we sort of... And so, you know, we kind of won it in, you know, two or three months and then spent 20 years losing it.

Speaker 4

And it's tragic. Now, it's not simple.

Speaker 5

I think it would have been a lot better to have done negotiations with the rump of a defeated Taliban at the end of 2001, rather than this sort of surrender deal that was done in 2020. But I understand that politically, and certainly with the Bush administration at the end of 2001, they were in…

Speaker 4

But I guess.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“The oil thing is just one of those sort of evergreen kind of theories that people reach for overseas and also to an extent here. And it's because it's the way conspiracy theories often are. It's a bit dumb and it's not really based on anything, but it makes you feel clever. You're looking at the big picture and you're in the know. We're focusing on all these pesky facts and details. But you've lost the big picture here, which only I understand.” — Toby Harnden, Mission Implausible

The guest, an author and journalist on the CIA in Afghanistan, is answering the "no blood for oil" theory about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just before this he described decades of foreign efforts to exploit divisions in American public opinion.

Mission Implausible · 2026-10-12 Permalink → Listen →
Mission Implausible Around 39:48 into the episode
Speaker 5

…well. And then a lot of the things that the Iranians said, the sort of North Vietnamese had said, you know, a decade or more earlier and now you get things with, you know, with the Russians and you have all these kind of leverage points with social media where you can just kind of mess things up.

Speaker 4

So it kind of bounces, it bounces back and.

Speaker 5

Forth and, and yeah, I mean, the, the oil thing is just one of those sort of evergreen kind of theories that people reach for overseas and also to an extent here. And it's because it's, it's the way conspiracy theories often are. It's a bit dumb and it's not really based on anything, but it makes you feel clever. But you're looking at the big picture and you're in the know. We're focusing on all these pesky facts and details. But you've lost the big picture here, which only I understand.

Speaker 1

No, it's exactly true. We don't want to keep you too much longer. And you've written these incredible books, often on the agency and other things as well. The First Casualty and the new book. And sometimes there's so much insider knowledge in there that often CIA officers don't know the whole story…

Speaker 4

I have a question.

Speaker 1

Did the agency help with any of this? What is their take on what you're finding out and what you're writing, if there is such a thing?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode